Working with the actors, working with production designers, working with the creative people who surround the process is really fun, it's really inspiring and I take great pleasure in working with them. That's what's most fun about directing.

Audiences can tell when you're being fake and they will eat you alive. But if you're doing something authentic they will connect to it and that can lead to commercial success.

For me, there were a few things in the Spider-Man comics that I thought were really interesting. There's this story about Peter's parents and where he came from, and I thought that it was really interesting to explore the emotional consequence of someone whose parents had left them, at a very young age.

I think that if you make something that's relatable then people will attach themselves to it. You can express it in a lot of different ways but I feel like as long as you are consistent and fair with the audience they'll engage irrespective of how they self-identify. I think it just gets too complicated to track all those differences between demographics.

It's very important to keep the emotions grounded, to keep the characters in some real place.

Earnestness can ferment into sentimentality.

When you have to react to a lizard that's a tennis ball, it's a really, really difficult, tricky piece of craft.